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I have begun to use GTK(2), and I find that the workings of the library to be very good, but the documentation sucks.
I want to upgrade to GTK3, but it seems I need to install something called packman. That is a difficult philosophical step for me. Why can't I simply download a zip file(s) somewhere?
The documentation uses a lot of words without saying much, and the downloads want you to download stuff OTHER then gtk in order to get gtk. Why don't they simply have a GTK package and let me decide if I need all the other stuff.
Also, I have been reading on forums, even if I do the packman stuff, it still isn't enough for C::B.
Anyway, that is mostly a rant, what I'd really like is a suggestion to an alternative to GTK+.
Here are some of my requirements...
#1, It must NOT be an interpreter. Using Code::Blocks and C, I get an exe file and I'd like to continue that way.
#2 It must be programmable using C. I'd really like to stick wiith C::B, but I guess in a pinch I can use Eclipse (although that is another nightmare I won't get into here.)
#3 GTK requires a bunch of DLL's to be shipped along with the exe file. It would be ideal if the entire target could be included in the single exe without having to rely on external dll's or .net framework or other external stuff.
Any suggestions woule be apreaciated.
Thanks, Mark.
You best bet is to give a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_widget_toolkits#High-level_widget_toolkits
If you wan to stick to C and not C++, then Qt is out.
The other that stands out is EFL. I've never used it myself, but it has good reputation and probably your best bet if you want to quit GTK+ and stick to C. However I don't know how easy it is to use it on Windows.
Now about GTK+:
Also, I have been reading on forums, even if I do the packman stuff, it still isn't enough for C::B.
There are people here that use GTK+ with Code::Blocks, so I don't get what kind of problem you're referring to.
Then your other problems:
The documentation uses a lot of words without saying much
Examples?
the downloads want you to download stuff OTHER then gtk in order to get gtk
What you don't get is that GTK+ is more that just the libgtk library. It has dependencies on a lot of other libraries, like glib, cairo, pango, etc. In the past there used to be a bundle or installer to have that installed on Windows, but people would mess up on setting the environment up based on their needs and give up. As the GTK+ manpower for the Windows platform is limited, the GTK+ team delegated the distribution of the GTK+ binaries to the MSYS2 project.
MSYS2 is a popular project that provides a lot of open source software already built for Windows, and solves the problem of building and installing dependencies by hand for the user. This step is made to make installation simpler, not harder. In a handful of commands you have GTK+ and all its dependencies installed for your platform, and can start coding your app. Another command and you have python and the python GTK+ bindings installed and can get started. Want to depend on another popular library? Chances are MSYS already provides it.
Windows has been known for decades to be bad on dependency management. If package management wasn't a a pain point on Windows, then stuff like chocolatey or conan wouldn't exist.
Your philosophical reluctance is merely that: philosophical. Sure GTK+ on Windows isn't perfect. With MSYS2 you will get packages built with gcc so the debug symbols are not compatible with the Visual Studio debugger and you will need to use gdb instead. But on your other question you say you use gcc and loathe Visual Studio, so this should not be a blocker to you.
GTK requires a bunch of DLL's to be shipped along with the exe file. It would be ideal if the entire target could be included in the single exe without having to rely on external dll's or .net framework or other external stuff.
This is not possible for the moment as static compilation of GTK+ isn't supported. The redistribution of an app, however, isn't as easy as I'd like it to be. The best way on Windows to redistribute your app while using MSYS2 is to create a pacman package for your app, listing its dependencies, then call pacman to install your app on an empty directory and tell it to install all your dependencies there too. The result will be a directory that you can redistribute, with a self-contained installation of your app and all its dependencies, GTK+ included.
I'm trying to cross-compile several libraries from OSX to iOS. I've successfully cross-compiled libjpeg and libogg.
But I can't compile libvorbis because configure insists on creating and running a small test program. This obviously fails, because it creates an armv7 binary, fails to run it, and then interprets this as missing ogg libraries.
How do you usually deal with this kind of problem? I'm tempted to hack the configure script to work around these issues, but because of this kind of failure some features may be disabled. I'm also thinking of letting configure generate a native Makefile and then convert it to use the iOS toolchain, but this seems too error prone.
Any advice?
If you are cross-compiling anything that has more dependencies than libc (glibc) it becomes much more complicated. You need to have already cross-compiled all the dependencies. And the cross-compiler toolchain and all helper build programs and scripts need to know how to find those dependencies (the cross-compiled libraries and headers).
You need to have already cross-compiled libogg (and its dependencies) and installed them into the cross-compile root directory. The headers and libraries from your build system can't be used for the host (arm7) system. They must be kept separate.
Also, if you want to have shared object libraries (*.so) and not just static libraries then there is a whole new set of complications. For example, while a cross-compiler toolchain contains a cross-compiled libc as part of the toolchain, you still need a libc for the host system. The libc that is part of the toolchain can be used for this, but the way it is structured is different than on the host system. Sometimes people copy and re-arrange the files, but often people just compile and install a new glibc for the root.
Anyways, all that to say, the two errors you are seeing are because the configure script is not able to find a cross-compiled libogg library. If you haven't already, you need to cross-compile libogg (and dependencies) and install them into your target root. Then you need to tell the configure script where your cross-compiled headers (yes, header are architecture specific) and libraries are in your target root. Usually using CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, etc (NOT --prefix) but there may be other environment variables you need to set also to affect things like pkg-config, etc. After you have built each dependency, then you need to get the makefile to install the dependency to the root. Usually this is done with make DESTDIR=[root] install but some makefiles have their own mechanism (or no proper alternate install mechanism).
You may also need to override certain configure checks (using environment variables) that are poorly written and don't have good cross-compile defaults. These variables usually start with ac_cv_*
So the basic process is to do this for packages that you need (in dependency order):
export CFLAGS=-I[root]/usr/include LDFLAGS=-L[root]/usr/lib CXXFLAGS=-I[root]/usr/include
export ac_cv_[test1]=[yes|no] ac_cv_[test2]=[yes|no] ...
./configure --host=[arm7-blah-blah]
make
make DESTDIR=[root] install
Good luck. Once you feel comfortable with standard cross-compiling, then you will be ready to take on the real black art, the Canadian cross ;-)
I finally figured it out. I tricked configure by explicitly making it link with ogg (LDFLAGS="/usr/local/ios/lib/libogg-armv7.a" ./configure ...) and then removed the explicit reference to the library from the generated makefile.
I have several applications that I wish to deploy using rpm. Some of the files in my application deployments override files from other deployed packages. Simply including the new files in the deployment package will cause rpm conflicts.
I am looking for the proper way to use rpm to update/replace already installed files.
I have already come up with a few solutions but nothing seems quite right.
Maintain custom versions of the rpms containing the original files.
This seems like a large amount of work for a relatively small reward even though it feels less like a hack than some of the other possible solutions.
Include the files in the rpm with another name and copy them over in the post section.
This would work but will mean littering the system with multiple copies of the files. Also it means additional maintenance in the rpm build spec for each file.
Use wget in the post section to replace the original files from some known server.
This is similar to the copy technique but the files wouldn't even live in the rpm. This might act like a nice central configuration authority though.
Deploy the files as new files, then use symlinks to override the originals.
This is also similar to the copy technique but with less clutter. The problem here is that some files don't behave well as symlinks.
To the best of my knowledge, RPM is not designed to permit updating / replacing existing files, so anything that you do is going to be a hack.
Of the options you list, I'd choose #1 as the least bad hack if the target systems are systems that I admin (as you say, it's more work but is the cleanest solution) and a combination of #2 and #4 (symlinks where possible, copies where not) if I'm creating the RPMs for others' systems (to avoid having to distribute a bunch of RPMs, but I'd make it very clear in the docs what I'm doing).
You haven't described which files need to be updated or replaced and how they need to be updated. Depending on the answers to those questions, you may have a couple of other options:
Many programs are designed to use a single default configuration file and also to grab configuration files from a .d subdirectory. For example, Apache uses /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and /etc/httpd/conf.d/*.conf, so your RPMs could drop files under /etc/httpd/conf.d instead of modifying /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. And if the files that you need to modify are config files that don't follow this pattern but could be made to, you can suggest to the package maintainers that they add this capability; this wouldn't help you immediately but would make future releases easier.
For command-line utilities like sendmail and lpr that can be provided by multiple packages, the alternatives system (see man alternatives) permits more than 1 RPM that provides these utilities to be installed side by side. Again, if the files that you need to modify are command-line utilities that don't follow this pattern but could be made to, you can suggest to the package maintainers that they add this capability.
Config file changes on systems that you administer are better managed through a tool like Cfengine or Puppet rather than through custom RPMs. I think that Red Hat favors Puppet.
If I were creating the RPMs for systems I don't administer, I'd consider using a third-party tool like Bitrock and dumping all of my stuff under /opt just so I wouldn't have to stomp on files installed by other admins' RPMs.
Edit (2019): Nowadays, Software Collections offers a useful alternative. You can create packages that install somewhere under /opt, and the Software Collections tools offer a standardized way for users to opt in to using those instead of whatever's normally installed under /usr. Red Hat uses this to distribute newer versions of tools for their otherwise stable and long-lived (i.e., older) Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions.
You can also execute rpm -U --replacefiles --replacepkgs ..., which will give you what you want.
See here for more info on RPM %files directives:
http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/s1-rpm-inside-files-list-directives.html
You can use the arguments from the %post and %pre sections in the RPM scriptlets to determine if you are installing, upgrading or removing packages.
If $1 is 0 - then we're removing old stuff. Targeting 0 packages installed.
If $1 is 1 - then we're installing new stuff. Targeting a total of 1 package to be installed.
If $1 is 2 or more - then we're upgrading this package and $1 represents the number of packages already installed.
These sections help with managing files among the versions.
Keep track of what you're doing between versions and consider what one might do if they were to skip a version or two.
Have consideration for these things and you should be good to go!
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Although several thousand Emacs Lisp libraries exist, GNU Emacs, until version 24.1 did not have an (internal) package manager.
I guess that most users would agree that it is currently rather inconvenient to find, install and especially keep up-to-date Emacs Lisp libraries.
Pages that make life a bit easier
For versions of Emacs older than 24.1:
Emacs Lisp List - Problem: I see dead people (links).
Emacswiki - Problem: May contain traces of nuts (malicious code).
Emacsmirror - The package repository I am working on. Problem: No package manager supports it natively yet.
Some package managers
It's not that nobody has tried yet. (Some of these did not exist when this question was asked.)
auto-install
borg.el - Assimilate Emacs packages using Git submodules.
el-get.el - Supports many sources.
elinstall.el
epackage aka DELPS - Debian packaging concepts applied to Emacs Lisp packages.
epkg.el - This is now just a tool for browsing the Emacsmirror.
install.el
install-elisp.el
jem-pkg.el
package.el - ELPA. Seems like it will be included in Emacs 24.
UPDATE -- package.el is included in GNU Emacs, starting with version 24.1
pases.el
pelm - Command line installer; using php.
plugin.el
straight.el - Recent and experimental, has not reached 1.0 release yet.
use-package.el
XEmacs package manager
package has been included in the Emacs trunk. epkg is not ready yet and also currently not available. At least install-elisp, plugin and use-package do not seem to be actively maintained anymore.
I have created a git repository containing all these package managers as submodules.
Some utilities that might be useful
Package managers could use these utilities and/or they could be used to maintain a mirror of packages.
date-calc.el - Date calculation and parsing routines.
ell.el - Browse the Emacs Lisp List.
elm.el, elx.el, xpkg.el - Used to maintain the Emacsmirror.
genauto.el - Helps generate autoloads for your elisp packages.
inversion.el - Require specific package versions.
loadhist.el, lib-requires.el, elisp-depend.el - Commands to list Emacs Lisp library dependencies.
project-root.el - Define a project root and take actions based upon it.
strptime.el - Partial implementation of POSIX date and time parsing.
wikirel.el - Visit relevant pages on the Emacs Wiki.
Discussions about the subject at hand
emacs-devel 20080801
comp.emacs 20021121
RationalElispPackaging
The question (finally)
So - I would like to know from you what you consider important/unimportant/supplementary etc. in a package manager for Emacs.
Some ideas
Many packages (the Emacsmirror provides that largest available collection of packages, but there is no explicit support in any package manager yet).
Only packages that have been tested.
Support for more than one package archive (so people can choose between many/tested packages).
Dependency calculated based on required features only.
Dependencies take particular versions into account.
Only use versions that have been released upstream.
Use versions from version control systems if available.
Packages are categorized.
Packages can be uninstalled and updated not only installed.
Support creating fork of upstream version of packages.
Support publishing these forks.
Support choosing a fork.
After installation packages are activated.
Generate autoload files.
Integration with Emacswiki (see wikirel.el).
Users can tag, comment etc. packages and share that information.
Only FSF-assigned/GPL/FOSS software or don't care about license.
Package manager should be integrated be distributed with Emacs.
Support for easily contacting author.
Lots of metadata.
Suggest alternatives before installing a particular package.
I am hoping for these kinds of answers
Pointers to more implementations, discussions etc.
Lengthy descriptions of a set of features that make up your ideal package manager.
Descriptions of one particular desired/undesired feature. Feel free to elaborate on my ideas from above.
Surprise me.
I'm still learning Emacs, so I haven't had a chance to look into package managers, but a great feature would be to inform the user that the package is available if they try to use it but it's not on their system. For example, I wanted to edit a PHP file on a server once, and I tried
M-x php-mode
and Emacs was all like
M-x php-mode [no match]
when it should have been like
php-mode available from ftp.gnu.org. install? (y/n)
and then it would have installed and loaded up php-mode for me. That would have made my day right there.
Automatic publishing from version control
I'd love to see a standard, central, and single Emacs package manager. Right now, I'd put my money on ELPA, but there is still a long way to go.
The biggest thing that would help an Emacs package manager would be to make it super trivial to publish packages. In my opinion, I'd like to see this happen in combination with a version control system like git on a central hosted platform like GitHub -- something that would make it easy for authors to publish their packages and would make it easy for others to contribute back.
Similar to how GitHub (used to) make it easy to publish RubyGems, I'd like to see something similar in an Emacs package manager. For example, tag your repository with "vX.Y.Z" and have your elisp goodness automatically available to all.
The added benefit of using a popular backend like GitHub is that you'd immediately get a lot of exposure which should help drive its success.
What I expect most is that everything useful is on it, and works well. This requires you (or a team of maintainers) to aggressively pursue packaging everything for it, and doing whatever that involves — emailing every author of a useful package, and so on.
For instance, the reason Debian (and its derivatives: Ubuntu etc.) is so good is that you can happily use your system without ever having to install something outside the repositories, and that everything on it is thoroughly tested. The actual features of the package manager are important, but secondary to the managed packages themselves.
Easy configuration synchronization: I, like many people, use Emacs on many different computers and servers, some of them my own and some not. It would be amazing if the package manager had some sort of file which I could transfer from one computer to another; then, on the latter computer, the package manager would bring my Emacs into the state I like it in -- all the packages installed and configurations set. Combined with the ability to be able to easily install either site-wide (if one has root permissions) or as a single user, I could synchronize all of Emacsen everywhere.
I'm nearly positive that the best solution involves submitting more packages to ELPA and adding multi-source support to package.el. The Emacs maintainers have said that they would consider including package.el in version 24 as long as it pointed to an FSF repository by default.
Of course, submission also needs to be an automated process too; the current method of mailing the ELPA maintainer only works on a small scale.
No matter how this is done, the most important thing in my opinion is that it should be trivial to submit packages to the repository. At the same time, we do not want those packages to be instantly available, to guard against malicious code(and due to licensing issues). Unless there is a "trust" system in place, based on crypto signatures.
Also useful:
"metapackages", to install several packages at once.
In the same way, we should be able to install a set of elisp files, for maintainability
"Broken" packages should not be allowed to disrupt Emacs startup. This is easy and I have it implemented in my own .emacs
Ability to install files other than scripts. This is often overlooked, but very useful. You'd be able to, for instance, ship images, for icons, toolbars, etc.
Versioning:package X requires package Y > 1.0
Testing: perform basic sanity checks, testing for conflicts (keybindings, function redefinitions, functions that are expected to be present but aren't, etc).
BUG TRACKING: I can't stress the importance of this enough. Having a centralized place to report package bugs (and being able to track them) is extremely important to assure the quality of the packages.
Some sort of compressed archive seems to be best to do some of the above.
So far, a much improved ELPA seems the way to go.
I once spent some time writing a small package manager for Emacs.
http://gmarceau.qc.ca/plugin.el
I wrote:
Plugin is my attempt at creating a
package manager for Emacs. Plugin
will automatically downloads Emacs
extensions, unpacks them in a
directory, adds that directory to the
load-path, generates auto-load
annotations, and modify your dot-emacs
file. The auto-load annotations are a
little-known feature of Emacs. Once
they are generated, Emacs extensions
load quickly and incrementally, which
is really nice if you have as many
extensions installed as I do.
You will need two library files to get it to run, loop-constructs.el and record.el
I think the hackers for the iPhone got quite close to what I want, as does Ubuntu's "apt".
I like to be able to:
add
remove (package only)
remove user settings
view documentation
upgrade ( after reading the change log)
add new archive ( aka add repository )
see dependencies
see version
search for name, keyword
browse by (date added, date modified, name)
save all installed packages & settings
load set of packages & settings
I would like a main set of things that all work nicely and are the recommended way of doing whatever. Then a global set where everything working gets in. Then the ability for anyone to host their own archive.
It would be nice if this was all tied into git/svn/whatever so that you could install old versions. Make your own patches by forking off etc etc etc....
Besides the mentioned above, i expect something like debian, and other repositories - set of the stable, experemental, untested packages. Ability to add my own repositories - i use lot of the packages directly from VCS, so it could be useful to create my own packages
I think that the package manager should take a lot of inspiration from Rubygems. I also think that it should have a site like Gemcutter.
A central repository could also be nice (like Emacsmirror). This however may not be necessary if a site like Gemcutter exists that collects all packages.
I think these things are important for this to work.
Central location of some kind that collects all packages
Easy to add packages
Easy to maintain packages
Easy to contribute to other packages
Easy to install, uninstall and update packages
Possibility to add package dependencies
Common structure for all packages
So a package manager like Rubygems with a site like Gemcutter and a central repository like Emacsmirror (preferably on Github because of it's social coding) would do Emacs really good.
All in all I think that much inspiration should be taken from Rails and how Rails handles Gems.
I don't know how fresh this question is...
but the model I would like to see is CPAN. I also don't know Rubygems but it sounds similar to CPAN.
CPAN is a perl archive + library management system. When I need to write a perl program that requires... FTP or SOAP or JSON or XML or ZIP, or...etc, I can run the CPAN package manager, select the requisite package for download, view and verify the dependencies, then install everything. CPAN is mirrored .."everywhere".
CPAN works wonderfully for my purposes, and something similar for emacs would be nice to have. It also supports building C/C++ code on demand.
That's what I would like to see in emacs.
Some further comment on requirements.
explicit download of packages. No auto install. No invisible downloads. I want to ask for new libraries or new function.
I should be able to list the name/version/timestamp of installed packages.
If my friend gives me his list, I should be able to diff his emacs state against mine.
check-for-updates function. What updates are available? What do they fix?
depedency checking, verification, and download. If I install csharp-mode and it requires v5.0.28 of cc-mode, then it should confirm with me, that I must also download cc-mode.
there should be some sort of community ranking of these packages, like ranking torrents on isohunt. I want to see if a package has 3 upvotes or 3000.
"transactional" behavior. If an install goes boom, it must unwind to a last-known-good state.
failsafes. If I've put custom mods in linum.el, it should refuse to install a new version over my changes, unless I explicitly allow it. It should warn me before even starting. Do this with checksums/md5's over the existing install.
have the option of running some packages from compressed archives, like zip files. So I never have any doubt that I have not updated any of the embbedded elisp.
ability to use mirrored hosts for package distribution.
all this function should be accessible through M-x library-manageemnt or something.
Finally, it would be nice to have a way to segregate or organize libraries of functions. Hierarchical namespaces. Emacs' flat namespace is very dated. This is sort of independent but complementary to the core function of package management. I'm not a lisp guru so I don't know how hard this would be; maybe there is already a way to do it.
Package managers don't offer anything I value w.r.t. single-file elisp packages with simple dependencies: adding and deleting from site-lisp has never caused problems. It's packages that depend on external programs (e.g., ispell), multi-file packages (e.g., auctex, org-mode) that can be tricky. Can't think of any single-file elisp package with nontrivial dependencies, offhand.
For these, short of a package manager, I'd like emacs' elisp-packages to acquire test suites which can be run en masse, and which provide useful information in the event of dependency failures.
It seems that most of the installers for Perl are centered around installing Perl modules, not applications. Things like ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Module::Build are very well suited for modules, but require some additional work for Web Apps.
Ideally it would be nice to be able to do the following after checking out the source from the repository:
Have missing dependencies detected
Download and install dependencies from CPAN
Run a command to "Build" the source into a final state (perform any source parsing or configuration necessary for the local environment).
Run a command to install the built files into the appropriate locations. Not only the perl modules, but also things like template (.tt) files, and CGI scripts, JS and image files that should be web-accessible.
Make sure proper permissions are set on installed files (and SELinux context if necessary).
Right now we have a system based on Module::Build that does most of this. The work was done by done by my co-worker who was learning to use Module::Build at the time, and we'd like some advice on generalizing our solution, since it's fairly app-specific right now. In particular, our system requires us to install dependencies by hand (although it does detect them).
Is there any particular system you've used that's been particularly successful? Do you have to write an installer based on Module::Build or ExtUtils::MakeMaker that's particular to your application, or is something more general available?
EDIT: To answer brian's questions below:
We can log into the machines
We do not have root access to the machines
The machines are all (ostensibly) identical builds of RHEL5 with SELinux enabled
Currently, the people installing the machines are only programmers from our group, and our source is not available to the general public. However, it's conceivable our source could eventually be installed on someone else's machines in our organization, to be installed by their programmers or systems people.
We install by checking out from the repository, though we'd like to have the option of using a distributed archive (see above).
The answer suggesting RPM is definitely a good one. Using your system's package manager can definitely make your life easier. However, it might mean you also need to package up a bunch of other Perl modules.
You might also take a look at Shipwright. This is a Perl-based tool for packaging up an app and all its Perl module dependencies. It's early days yet, but it looks promising.
As far as installing dependencies, it wouldn't be hard to simply package up a bunch of tarballs and then have you Module::Build-based solution install them. You should take a look at pip, which makes installing a module from a tarball quite trivial. You could package this with your code base and simply call it from your own installer to handle the deps.
I question whether relying on CPAN is a good idea. The CPAN shell always fetches the latest version of a distro, rather than a specific version. If you're interested in ensuring repeatable installs, it's not the right tool.
What are your limitations for installing web apps? Can you log into the machine? Are all of the machines running the same thing? Are the people installing the web apps co-workers or random people from the general public? Are the people installing this sysadmins, programmers, web managers, or something else? Do you install by distributed an archive or checking out from source control?
For most of my stuff, which involves sysadmins familiar with Perl installing in control environments, I just use MakeMaker. It's easy to get it to do all the things you listed if you know a little about MakeMaker. If you want to know more about that, ask a another question. ;) Module::Build is just as easy, though, and the way to go if you don't already like using MakeMaker.
Module::Build would be a good way to go to handle lots of different situations if the people are moderately clueful about the command line and installing software. You'll have a lot of flexibility with Module::Build, but also a bit more work. And, the cpan tool (which comes with Perl), can install from the current directory and handle dependencies for you. Just tell it to install the current directory:
$ cpan .
If you only have to install on a single platorm, you'll probably have an easier time making a package in the native format. You could even have Module::Build make that package for you so the developers have the flexibility of Module::Build, but the installers have the ease of the native process. Sticking with Module::Build also means that you could create different packages for different platforms from a single build tool.
If the people installing the web application really have no idea about command lines, CPAN, and other things, you'll probably want to use a packager and installer that doesn't scare them or make them think about what is going on, and can accurately report problems to you automatically.
As Dave points out, using a real CPAN mirror always gets you the latest version of a module, but you can also make your own "fake" CPAN mirror with exactly the distributions you want and have the normal CPAN tools install from that. For our customers, we make "CPAN on a CD" (although thumb drives are good now too). With a simple "run me" script everything gets installed in exactly the versions they need. See, for instance, my Making my own CPAN talk if you're interested in that. Again, consider the audience when you think about that. It's not something you'd hand to the general public.
Good luck, :)
I'd recommend seriously considering a package system such as RPM to do this. Even if you're running on Windows I'd consider RPM and cygwin to do the installation. You could even set up a yum or apt repository to deliver the packages to remote systems.
If you're looking for a general installer for customers running any number of OSes and distros, then the problem becomes much harder.
Take a look at PAR.
Jonathan Rockway as a small section on using this with Catalyst in his book.